The king makes a good subject. Over the months of designing and modelling his head in profile for the British coinage, I have had to examine his features with the scrutiny of a cartographer mapping a landscape.
The process of modelling a bas-relief is painstaking. Commissioned by the Royal Mint, I made a model in plasticine about the size of my outstretched hand and no more than a few millimetres deep. This was then digitally scanned and reduced before dies were struck and coins started pouring into crates. When I was told a test run of 50p pieces was to be produced, I asked how many, imagining a dozen or so. “We’ll start with 9.6m,” came the reply.
